The Road Into Winter
by polar-realm
Summary: Jean is more shaken by her ordeal in Riful's custody than she lets on, but she isn't alone. Jea/Clare.


Jean prefers to keep moving, when she can.

It isn't fear that pushes her, exactly, nor any sense of danger. The Abyssal is leagues behind already and not giving chase, and there's nothing else in these woods that could threaten the two of them together, or even Jean alone. No need to cover so much ground, so quickly and without surcease, or think of anything more complicated than the trail ahead, the cleansing burn of exertion in muscles made stiff by too long in chains, the ache of deep wounds slow to heal. Light so bright, so unrelentingly present, that it feels like her eyes still haven't adjusted. She drinks in the silence, lets it fill her and lets herself fall into the rhythms of travel, reveling in the stretch of unbroken woodland beneath her feet.

By the time the two of them stop to make camp, they're already well into the mountains. The air is cold and thin, scented with pine and hemlock and sharp with the bite of the coming winter. Dark falls early this far north, this time of year. Jean remembers that from long ago, and it's a little uncanny to find herself here again, on the edge of this season.

She builds the fire high as the sun sinks westward, and she keeps it burning – not for warmth, and not for safety, but survival means something different for their kind than either. You keep to the small things, the human rituals: gather wood, strike flint and tinder, sit close enough to borrowed heat and borrowed light for smoke to sting your eyes and settle deep in clothing and hair. Do that, the theory has it, remember _who_ you are, and you won't ever lose your hold on _what_. The woman who trained her had told her that, years before. Now, she watches pine needles glow red and curl into nothing, and wonders how true it is.

Clare breaks off a piece of dry bread, holds it out to her without speaking. There isn't much of it left. Soldiers travel light as a matter of habit, carry no more than needed, and now Clare's rations are being split between two. They'll have to stop for supplies soon, Jean knows, or take some time for hunting. Neither option appeals. The thought of being surrounded by humans after so long in the wilderness leaves her oddly weary, uneasy in her own skin in a way she can't quite put a name to and doesn't quite want to. The thought of killing something for food –

"No," she says. "Thank you, but no. I'm not – "

Clare nods, and tucks the bread away, and does not offer again. It's a small thing, and more courtesy, Jean suspects, than kindness. It's striking, even so – maybe more than it should be, she supposes. Certainly more than she expected. Clare looks at her from beneath hooded eyes, shadows chasing shadows across her face, and Jean is caught by the ruddy glow of firelight on her skin, the darkness pooling where firelight doesn't reach. And that wary and dogged pride in her eyes, the set of her mouth, half-defiance and half-resignation. Even just catching a glimpse of it is enough to send a shiver of recognition crawling down Jean's spine, like passing by a place she has been before and never intends to return to. She knows that way of looking slant-wise at the world, always careful, always waiting. She doesn't want to, but she does.

There are monsters in the deep places, beneath the still, reflective surface. There are things hidden. That is the nature of mirrors, and she is looking into one now, and both of them know it.

Jean is the one who looks away first, up through smoke and into darkness, fighting the impulse to withdraw from this place altogether. She reminds herself again that honor is strength restrained willing, that duty is the heart of honor, but it isn't only duty now, bidding her go or bidding her stay.

The truth is, she needs this companionship, this other's presence. She isn't safe yet, though she will be. She isn't certain, yet, that she knows how to live in a world without her friends in it, though she's learned before and she can learn again, given distance, given time. She doesn't have time. She doesn't have distance. She doesn't have anything except the road ahead, and this firelight, and this almost-stranger who walks beside her.

The truth is, she needs this debt.

* * *

They travel north.

There are villages in these mountains, though not many, oxcarts along the road, gravestones and small shrines at odd intervals in the wilderness. They stop in one small town along the way to pick up food and other essentials, ignoring averted eyes, low whispers, the scent of fear. Clare asks about the boy, as she does in every town they pass through – _sandy-haired_, she says, _young, a scar on his temple, caught by slavers_. There's no word of him.

They don't stay the night. The village headman is apologetic but unrelenting – _It's just, you understand, two half-yoma, I can't ask my people – _wringing his hands and sweating all the while. Coward, maybe, but at least the man has the balls and the honesty to say it straight to their faces. It's hard not to pity him, a little.

_You're in no danger_, she wants to tell him, before they leave. But she turns without speaking, leaves him stammering there and doesn't look back along that road until they settle in for the night, far enough away that they can't even smell the smoke from the chimneys. Jean has never been easy with lying.

* * *

_If she can just keep moving_, she thinks.

If she can keep moving, it will be alright. And so she does, and if Katea's name is still a sound on the wind, a small piece of deeper darkness twined around sinew and bone, so be it. She won't be the first ghost of Jean's acquaintance, and gods know she won't be the last. Ghosts are just ghosts, anyway – there's no harm to them. In the end, it's the living a warrior knows to fear.

And Jean is not afraid. Not exactly. But there are times these days when she looks down at her hands and expects them to look – different. Sometimes it feels like she's hanging in open air, just a breath of wind and one missed handhold away from freefall. And there are times, too, when she watches sparks rise, bits of ash carried upward, and wonders what it would feel like, really, to fly.

At night she dreams of a ruined hall beneath the ground, smelling of dry earth and old blood, and of what had happened there. Usually, the dreams are nightmares. Sometimes, they aren't nightmares until she wakes up.

And when she does, on that night with that village so close behind them, and feels the cold that doesn't affect her sliding over her skin, she can't help but lift a hand to her face, as if touch alone could somehow lend the illusion permanence. _Human_, she thinks, tracing the contours of eyes and nose, the thin lips, the sharp chin.

Not human. Close enough.

She stands, walks into the trees, away from the town and past the place where Clare sits with eyes closed, leaning back against her sword and not really sleeping. Clare doesn't glance up, though, as Jean passes, doesn't call out to her. Another small courtesy, unless this time it truly is kindness. Jean owes her much, and the weight of honor sits uneasy on her shoulders for a moment – not quite unwelcome – before she shrugs it off for a time, lets it fall as she leaves the camp behind and feels the forest close in around her.

The ground is dappled silver and dark, pale moonlight falling through the crossed shadows of branches high above. She hears the chittering sounds of small night-hunters, too high and faint for human ears, and the rustle of prey animals in the leaves below. No monsters in these woods, though, or none but the one with borrowed cloak and blade slung across her back, searching for something even she doesn't know how to recognize.

Peace, maybe. That sounds right.

Her hand finds the hilt of her sword, and the worn leather is familiar to the touch as she draws and falls into a fighting stance, but every movement is strange now, just slightly out of alignment. Her body feels alien, like something only borrowed – a sharper, stronger weapon than she's used to, and one that she knows will need returning, that maybe can't be trusted not to break. She cuts the air three times in rapid succession, more force behind the attack than she has ever brought to bear before, and settles back into stillness. Considers the blade in her hands, the edge of it catching moonlight, and thinks about what she can do, now. What she can't.

She spins and strikes again, faster now, moving through the old steps and letting them sweep her along. This will not last, this frenetic energy. Nothing does. But she pushes herself harder anyway, chasing exhaustion until the landscape blurs in her eyes and the world is narrowed down to a single point of steel. Again, lunge and strike upward, block left, slash low and brutally quick. Again. _Again_. And then it's over, like a storm wearing itself out, and she's left leaning heavy on the hilt of her sword, no sound but the sound of her own harsh breathing. Night around her, too quiet. All the animals gone. They know what they're avoiding.

Jean knows too, but even so the emptiness feels – just for a moment – like reprieve.

It feels like ritual too, in this dark, beneath these trees, and on a moment's impulse she crouches down, grits her teeth and draws the edge of her blade sharp across her palm – fleeting pain and blood to fall on the frozen earth, in promise of sacrifice still to be made. When she looks down, the wound is already closing.

_For you, Katea_, she thinks. _No sword for a gravemarker, but don't you think I've forgotten._

And she shakes her head, feels the beginnings of a laugh caught in her chest, tearing her open from the inside out. These southern people don't hold with sacrifice, not that kind. They make no bargains with any powers that might be appeased by blood. But Jean is not from the south, and she does not believe in gods that offer anything for nothing, and she has not been human in a very long time. And Katea... Katea had already passed the point where a sword would mean more to her than blood.

Jean blinks tears from her eyes, and wonders if she would have been strong enough – whether or not she had ever had it in her to grant her old friend the only mercy that mattered. No way of knowing, now. No sense wondering what can't be known.

She whispers the old name one more time, though there's nothing here to listen, and turns back to camp.

* * *

Clare isn't sleeping when she returns, either. This time her eyes are open, and she is waiting, Jean is certain, watching for something that might or might not be danger. She stands as Jean approaches – wiry body unfolding from the ground, lean and lithe and _yes,_ Jean thinks, _she is beautiful_, before brushing that thought off like the nuisance it is, the troublesome distraction. She is the one who owes the debt, Clare is the one who holds it. It is always dangerous to want too much.

It's near morning, now. They'll be packing up their few possessions and traveling soon, when grey winter light starts creeping over the horizon, and Jean knows it will be simpler when they're moving again. But Clare is troubled – she can sense it in the way her eyes map the clearing, vigilant, the dark and questing ripple of her youki. Something worries her. Not yoma. Not the Abyssal. Something else.

"What's wrong?" Jean asks, speaking softly.

"You know we're going North to die?" Clare asks.

"Everyone goes North to die," Jean says. It isn't true, entirely. It isn't false. There's a reason that Alfonse is a country of slaves and convicts, hunted men, vagrants with nowhere else to go. The North is suicide by nature's own lottery, and it's never a kind death, either, unless you're lucky enough to die of cold. Jean was born there, and she knows.

"Is that – " Clare steps closer, eyes moon-silver, her face unreadable. "Is that still what you're after?"

And Jean laughs a little, the breath catching in her throat, the weight of the blade still easy in her hand.

_I don't know,_ she thinks, _maybe_, but that isn't what Clare wants to hear, and she doesn't know, really, that it's even what she wants to say.

"You're not the only one with kin to avenge," she says instead, and, "Going North... for me, it's going home." It isn't an easy thing to acknowledge. The memory is hers – her home, thatched roof, hard-packed earthen floor with a firepit in the center, the empty space in the root cellar when winter lingers on too long. Snow outside the door, piled high, and her parents' voices, murmuring soft and low at the earliest threshold of memory. You don't forget the cold, or the firelight either. You hold to the small things, you keep them with you, but you never give them away. And she wonders for a moment if she has misspoken, but Clare only nods slightly, as if in resolution, and Jean cannot bring herself to regret the admission.

"We'll have our vengeance, then," Clare says, and Jean can sense nothing but certainty in her muted aura, and the bright flash of anger. Rank forty-seven and stronger than she should be, infinitely more dangerous, this honorable deserter who fights with a mad tenacity that Jean has seldom seen. The world is full of unexpected things indeed.

She doesn't know why the thought of that makes her feel lighter now, less weighted down with the memory of earth and iron – only that it does, leaves her reckless and shaken and something close to free. It's something to do with precarious heights, impossibilities, something about not flying but not _falling_ either. Living proof that things don't have to happen the way you've always known they would.

Jean sets the blade down, careful, deliberate, and settles down on the cold ground, beneath the shelter of a spindly pine tree, bows her head but does not sleep. She imagines forests falling away behind her and mountains ahead, people that need protecting, places like the place where she was born. After a moment, Clare sits down beside her, and wraps her cloak around them both.

And it is almost morning. But it isn't morning yet.

Jean feels Clare's fingers curl lightly around her own, careful, all swordswoman's callouses and force restrained. And she feels the warmth of Clare's body pressed against her, her solid presence, and it is dangerous to want – like being alive is dangerous, or stepping too close to an open flame, and if they are going North to die, she thinks, at least she wants to have this. And for once, with stars and bare branches above her, there's no room for grief or memory, or anything except the soft whisper of darkness, the cold wrapping around her like a blanket and Clare in her arms, silent and impossibly trusting.

There are more things than monsters in mirrors. Jean knows that. She hasn't forgotten it.

She doesn't sleep again that night, but she closes her eyes to the sight of snowflakes on the wind, settling in her hair, and the weight of another heavy on her shoulder, somehow still lighter than all her ghosts. The air smells clean and cold, and not at all like rust or stone or blood, and Jean is going home. But she isn't going alone.

In the end, she supposes, that's all a warrior ever has. In the end, it's the only thing that matters – not strength, not vengeance, not even honor or a good death. Just this. And the road is waiting, but even so, Jean knows, it can wait a little longer. _This is worth it_, she thinks. _This is enough._ She shakes her head and half-smiles, only a little sadly, listens to the soft rise and fall of Claire's breathing and waits to meet the dawn.


End file.
